Phanar walked on numb feet. He went last through the seventh chamber, and this time he kept his eyes on Kani’s feet in front of him rather than looking around at the madness of it.
The fifth and sixth had been hard enough to look at, even for him. He had no squeamishness. This was not an offence of disgust.
He had honour. This was an offence of… of humiliation.
Of blasphemy.
“The cavern, the tunnel, the lair,” he caught Kani saying as they left behind the smouldering remains of the dire bats.
“What is this?” he asked, taking a couple of long strides to come closer to her.
But she did not reply, even when he prompted her again.
It was only a couple of minutes before her meaning was made plain.
Hidden from sight and sound and scent, they followed a narrow stream of water up to the lip of a drop where it became a little waterfall. They peered over a ledge Anathta found, looking down into the vast cavern, a space dwarfing all the others they’d come across till now.
Phanar had no phobias to speak of. Heights and coffins, lightning and spiders, blood and oceans… None of the common fears of which he’d heard had ever been a cause for concern, for him. But he’d felt a touch of it, the irrational terror, when he’d detected the wolf’s odour back in the kobold city – yet there’d been only the one of them, and seeing it had dispelled the worst of the horror that gripped his throat and heart in bony fingers.
Now, looking down at this – it was as though time had reversed. He was standing there on Miserdell’s battlements, looking out onto the sea of fur, the army of dire wolves that dripped with the blood of the townspeople.
They were here. Hundreds and hundreds of them. A pack of wolves of such size, such organisation that its like would never be found in the wild, even amongst dire wolves. No – this pack had a pack leader the likes of which the mind of the wolf had never before conceived. A leader whose dominance could not ever be put to any kind of meaningful test. A master whose slightest flicker of annoyance could mutate them, drown them in their own insides, even as his favour might upraise them, heal them of their injuries and swell their musculature, their bone structure, without limit.
In the centre of the cavern, they were lounging atop a huge, smooth outcropping of grey rock, feasting on vast quantities of meat. On the right side, they warmed themselves before massive open coal-pits, above which natural vents in the high, jagged ceiling captured the smoke. And on the left side they were fighting each other – not for real, but not quite play-fighting either. It looked to have the character of duelling, more than just sparring, to Phanar’s eye. Some of the biggest, meanest-looking dire wolves were circling groups of lesser ones, growling their drills like battlefield sergeants.
The warrior could smell the stench of wet wolf-fur, and leaned over even further, looking at the base of the rock-wall beneath him. The little waterfall beside which he was crouched wasn’t the only one – the waters of several streams ran down the cliff-face nearby, and had pooled together in a depression at the bottom. A couple of dozen wolves were languishing down there in the coolness of the puddle, right below him.
He shuddered, and drew back.
Then he returned his eyes to the first thing he’d spotted when he first looked down: their goal.
On the far side of the cavern, in the wall opposite them – a squared-off opening, leading downwards into darkness. A final tunnel, as Kani mentioned.
The cavern. The tunnel. The lair…
Suddenly, as though they’d all heard some signal simultaneously, the wolves stopped whatever they were doing, even letting half-chewed mouthfuls of food drop from their open jaws. They drew themselves up, raised their eyes towards the cavern-roof, and fell silent.
An eerie stillness seemed to spread throughout the open expanse, broken only by the tinkling trickles of the waterfalls. Phanar held his breath.
Then, all at once, the wolves poured into formation, the biggest to the fore, and started racing up the wall to the left. They reached the level of the adventurers within seconds, then went thundering past, following a different path into the network of passageways to the one Kani had chosen.
It took them almost a minute to go by, a minute of paralysis for Phanar, of daunting, ever-worsening dread. Slaying the snake had felt like it took four seconds. This felt like half an hour, time broken down into an infinite, unending series of moments in which the certainty that one of the wolves would see through the concealing-spell only grew and grew inside his mind.
Then the infinite, unending series ended. They were gone, every one of them. Their scents, however, lingered behind.
“How very dramatic,” Redgate mused.
Phanar got to his feet and looked around at the others before holding out his hand to Ibbalat.
“R-rope.”
He marvelled at the way his voice shook – this had never happened to him before.
“If they know we’re here,” the mage said, already pulling out his demiskin, “I suppose I won’t need to disintegrate the rope once we’re at the bottom?”
“We’re coming back this way, aren’t we?” Anathta gazed at him quizzically before moving, skirting the cavern so that they wouldn’t land in water. “The only other option is climbing the wyrm’s own route, through the kobolds’ wards – we’d be caught out in the open in moments. We’ll leave it.”
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“My concern,” Phanar said, taking the first few loops of rope from Ibbalat, “is that none of the wolves were sleeping.”
“A trap?” Ibbalat asked. “I mean, the other kind of trap. You think… they were waiting for us to arrive?”
The warrior rolled his shoulders. “I think Ord Ylon was waiting. Yes.”
Phanar knotted the rope around a boulder and cast off the end. His sister went first, taking the coarse length of material loosely in one hand and basically leaping off the cliff’s edge.
Ibbalat went next, and as the magician descended Phanar noted Kani’s troubled expression, freckled face creased in consternation.
He wasn’t alone in noting it.
“Sister Vael?” Redgate said with aplomb, holding out a hand in a gentlemanly fashion. “I too was not intending on using the rope. I can convey you to the basin far more quickly and without any untoward sensation, I assure you.”
“Why… thank you,” she murmured, and, without meeting his arachnid face, she took his hand.
As they too vanished over the edge, Phanar, left alone at the top, hurriedly hauled on the rope and abseiled down.
When he found his feet and turned to regroup with the others, he saw that his three friends were standing in a row before the floating Redgate, staring with slack jaws into the air between them and the sorcerer because there was… there was…
A demon. A bird. A beautiful bird wrought of pure nothingness, keeping itself steady with lazy swipes of its black wings.
Everything Phanar had ever sought – it was there, before him, embodied in this frozen instant. Redgate had it. Redgate possessed it. Just as Redgate possessed everything.
Floating there behind the demon was a tiny, beautiful crimson cloud… He felt the way it drew his gaze, his eyes falling into it the way an anchor falls to the seabed.
An uncomfortable warmth, flowing not over his flesh but through it…
Vivid black lightning.
Dull, distant thunder.
Redgate was speaking to them, and their lips were moving in response.
They were giving him answers. He was enchanting them with one of his eldritches. He wanted to know – wanted to know – what they knew –
Redgate possesses the emptiness but he squanders it. He defecates upon it! He is the antithesis of free! He was swallowed by his ghost! He drowned in the sand! He smashed the hourglass and ate up the shards until he died inside!
His future found him, and became him.
Something about the insulting nature of the sorcerer’s acts, the unendurable mockery of what he was doing to them all, to their minds – what he was doing to his sister – something about the situation brought Phanar to the surface.
With a titanic effort, the warrior wrenched his attention away from the awful eldritch and its awful, awful cloud.
“Phanar of N’Lem.” The archmage sounded surprised, turning from Kani’s blank face to look over at him. “You are no longer my foe?”
“No, I am,” Phanar growled. “But… you are not mine.” It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, biting back his anger. “Mine dwells beyond yon tunnel.”
“Well-spoken.” Redgate affected a despondent sigh. “I fear that I shall be inconsolable for weeks, now the charade is ended and the game is over. I have enjoyed this ruse, more than you can know.” He looked across the others, eyes lingering on Anathta. “I really was going to let all of you go, afterwards, you know. I would’ve erased many of the events of our trip from your mind – erasing is so much easier than the other options – but now, alas, I fear that chance has passed us by. My eldritches are limited, and I am a poor enchanter. It would require a form of innocence you no longer possess, for you to volunteer to undergo the process.” The sorcerer cocked his head. “But surely you will permit me to slay your true foe for you, before you pass into my service? You would want to see that much, at least, yes?”
“I do not know the reason for your hate,” Phanar replied quietly. “I do know that you would never have let us go. I know that you always intended to press us into your… service.”
Redgate laughed, trembling upwards and downwards in the air as he floated.
“Oh, tell yourself what you must, dragon-slayer. The truth is, you would have lived, but for your own powers of inference which have doomed you. This is not the first time I have utilised the pedheliorph to query you. I knew you knew, the day you knew it… No, do not trouble yourself. You will not remember the evening when you first fell under its spell. And as to this hate… My good man, you speak only to a mirror, a reflective cage of your own imposition. It is your heart harbouring hatred, Phanar of N’Lem, your heart that dwells upon the inevitability of murder. I must confess, I am myself merely apathetic, where your continued existence is concerned. Nonetheless – I believe you shall make a fine deathknight.” His head tilted towards Kani. “What shall be made of the Sister of Wythyldwyn, I wonder.”
There was no fierce shout, no battle-cry or word of warning.
Phanar pounced, his hammer and sword singing in his hands.
But the air itself was like an unseen dome of solid steel, rebuffing his leap, repelling him – he landed lightly, coiling to spring at his enemy once more –
“Enough, Phanar.” Redgate sounded bored. “I have a much more-entertaining confrontation to attend. Come – you are invited to witness. Speak with him. Distract him, while I secure the best position for my attack. We do not even yet know for certain whether he is aware of my presence, or my particular capabilities.”
Redgate simply turned his back, and the bird-demon vanished – the sorcerer drifted away towards the tunnel on the far side of the cavern, not keeping an eye on Phanar, clearly confident in his invulnerability.
The others were shaking their heads, looking about in a confusion he hoped would only be momentary.
“He knows!” he hissed at them while they tried to focus their eyes on him, on their surroundings. “He has known all along. He moves to slay Ord Ylon, and invites us to watch before we join the ranks of the undead at his command!”
“He… he knows?” Kani said in disbelief. “H-how?”
“We could – could we run?” Ibbalat suggested, looking back at the rope and patting his pouches.
“From him?” Phanar snarled. He cast a quick glance at the sorcerer’s receding form, still floating across the cavern, then whispered as quietly as he was able: “He would enjoy the hunt. We will not give him such sport. We will follow him, and hope Ylon weakens him. We will do this thing ourselves. If we fail, it will be on our own terms. We will extract such toll for our souls that clutching them shall bind him in pain eternal. In so doing we earn ourselves divine reprieve from his malice. Such is my will and prayer.”
Anathta didn’t respond in any way, her own gaze fixed on Redgate in the distance. Ibbalat chewed on a fresh leaf of wane and ducked his head in acknowledgement, while Kani just looked past Phanar at the passageway leading to the dragon’s lair and nodded distractedly, her mind and spirit clearly far removed from this Material Plane.
The warrior turned and, trying not to breathe through his nose due to the disgusting scents of this place, he strode after the sorcerer, leading his sister, his brother-in-arms and his beloved towards their not-so-final resting place.
Redgate reached the wall when they were still a hundred feet from the tunnel, and vanished into the rock without once looking back.
Phanar stared at the dim hole ahead as he drove his body forwards, nervelessly accepting the potions Ibbalat passed into his hands, draining them without question or interest. The opening in front of him was redolent with the odours of wolves and their waste, yes, but also that other familiar scent: charred flesh; an ancient mustiness that no other wyrm he’d ever encountered had possessed – none save this one, this prince of dragons called Ord Ylon.
For a moment, he was back on Miserdell’s battlements one more time, beaten and battered by the noxious tempest of the behemoth’s wings.
I am here, he thought. Finally, I am here. And still, I do not know which of them I most want to die.
* * *